Burnt Ash and Golden Eyes
by Insane Troll Logic
Summary: When Shawn Spencer is six months old, his mother spontaneously combusts over his cradle.


**Title**: Burnt Ash and Golden Eyes  
**Rating**: PG-13 (entrails)  
**Disclaimer**: Neither Psych or Supernatural can be classified as mine. This is just for fun. Not profit.  
**Summary**: When Shawn Spencer is six months old, his mother his mother spontaneously combusts over his cradle.  
**Note**: It seems to be my subconscious desire to cross every single one of my fandoms with Supernatural. I am undecided on if this is a good thing or not.

* * *

**Burnt Ash and Golden Eyes**

When Shawn Spencer is six months old, his mother his mother spontaneously combusts over his cradle. Even twenty-eight years later, Shawn can remember the feel of the heat, the steady drip-drip of blood, his father fresh off his shift, single-mindedly grabbing him from his cradle without even a glance towards the ceiling and the low whine of the fire engines making their way to the little house.

A year later everything's back to normal, his dad's remarried, Shawn's began teetering around the place and jabbering mostly gibberish at high speed and the house shows no sign that there ever was a fire, but Shawn still remembers.

That's the thing about Shawn; he doesn't forget

* * *

The first time he realizes something weird is going one, he's trying to get Gus out of his office just like he always does. He happens to barge in on a meeting this time, he's done this before of course, come in and spouted something about Gus's fictional cat and whined until his friend made an excuse to leave.

This time he barges into the conference room, puts on his best deep voice and says, "Gus you are in grave danger. You must leave immediately."

See usually when Shawn pulls a stunt like this he has to bargain and whine and put some extra work in to getting his best friend out of the office, but this time Gus nods once, grabs his coat and strides out of the office without even saying a word.

Shawn blinks and thinks 'that's weird,' doesn't think much of it because after all, the end results are still the same but he files it automatically in the depths of his memory.

* * *

The second time he realizes something's weird, he's trying to talk the chief into letting him and Gus on a pretty gruesome serial killer and Karen's got this haggard look on her face like she guesses that the only reason he wants on the case is so he can see how long Gus will last before blowing grits.

"I just don't think you need to be on this case Mr. Spencer."

Shawn shakes his head in mostly feigned indignation. "You know what I need chief? I need a pineapple smoothie, I need new curtains for the office, I need to order me an awesome swivel chair like you've got. But this isn't about what I need." He puts both hands on the chief's desk and leans toward her. "This is about what you need. And you need me on this case."

He's expecting one of those half amused, half exasperated smiles the chief seems to get whenever she talks to him, but instead he gets an ever so slight shake of the head and an inexplicable response. "You know what, Shawn," she says. "You're right. We do need you on this case."

"You won't regret this," Shawn tells her sincerely.

"That's right," says the chief slowly. "I won't."

"Do you mind if I take a look at the case file?" Shawn asks, because he's never seen the chief this cooperative and Shawn's never been above milking his every advantage. "You know see if I get any psychic vibrations?"

"I'll have Detective Lassiter get you a copy."

* * *

As if that's not weird enough Shawn runs across the killer while he's snooping in a crime scene and finds himself backed against the wall with his hands raised in the air and a gun pointed at his chest. The killer's a Caucasian male. He's six-one with a blond crew-cut, a slightly rotated left front tooth, ears with lobes attached to the skull, and a lazy left eye. Shawn will be able to drawn him from memory if he survives this, able to describe his every feature down to the most minute detail. The killer calm cocks his gun, finger tensing on the trigger. This will make Shawn victim number thirteen. He remembers the others from the crime scene photos in startling clarity, the bullet hole in the forehead, the grotesque post-mortem positioning.

"Wait!" Shawn screams, closing his eyes and waiting for the gunshot. "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait." When he doesn't hear a shot, he cracks one eye open. The killer is frozen, with that same intense look on his face. "You don't want to do this," Shawn says. "There's another way. Don't kill me."

"And what's that other way?" the killer asks. He has a nasally high-pitched voice that is jarring for a man of his size. Shawn wants to make a crack at how this may have drove him to murder, but keeps it to himself.

"The other way?" Shawn sputters, mind running wildly. "You-you-you could start a career in show-biz, move to Vegas get your own act, you could take up deep sea diving, you could—" he coughs nervously. "—I don't know come down to the station with me and turn yourself in?"

The gun drops and the man's shoulders slump. "Yeah, ok," he says in that obnoxiously nasally voice. "Let's go."

"Give me your gun," Shawn says and to his amazement, the killer hands it over. The gun is a cool dead weight in Shawn's head and he keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it never does. "Let's go," he says and tries to keep from bouncing in glee when he actually walks the guy into the station.

* * *

It's Gus who calls him on it first, who pulls him aside after he marches the most wanted man on the coast into the Santa Barbara Police Department and hisses, "Shawn! I know you did not just capture that guy on your own."

"Chill, Gus, it was easy. He was very reasonable."

"Reasonable?" Gus screeched. "They guy killed a dozen people and you brought him in without breaking a sweat."

"Well clearly my powers of persuasion know no bounds."

"Shawn."

There is a note of warning in his friend's voice--something Shawn has heard before. He's been taking stupid risks and if not for a bizarre stroke of luck, Shawn would be dead. "I'm serious," Shawn say. "I asked him to come down to the station and he said 'let's go.'"

Gus gives him the patented skeptic look. "And that didn't strike you as the slightest bit weird?"

Shawn shrugs. "I'm a convincing guy."

Gus snorts and rolls his eyes. "Not that convincing."

* * *

The next day he tells Lassiter to go screw himself and Lassiter gets _this look_ on his face and he says, "I'm not sure that's anatomically possible, Spencer."

Shawn watches his face for another moment and then something clicks. "Oh God," he says. "I didn't mean _literally_."

* * *

And that's about the time when he starts dreaming about the yellow-eyed man. Now if it wasn't bad enough the yellow-eyed man starts talking about killing people. Shawn's got no particular desire to attempt that pass-time but he has to wonder about the psychological ramifications of a man in his head who is constantly telling him to kill his best friend. If nothing else, he knows that's just not healthy.

He tells Gus about this one Thursday afternoon over their usual Chinese take-out lunch, bringing up the subject as carefully as he knows how. "Gus?" he says casually. "What would you say if I told you I've been having these weird super-vivid dreams?"

"I'd say dreams are the manifestations of your unconscious mind," Gus says immediately. "Dreams are our means of expressing unconscious desires we could never vocalize while awake."

Shawn nods, shoveling another bite of Chinese into his mouth. He's still chewing through his bite of kong-pow chicken when he says, "And what if I've been dreaming about this dude with yellow eyes who tells me to kill you?"

He would have enjoyed the mildly panicked widening of his best friend's eyes if he hadn't been completely serious for once in his life. "I'd say dreams are random misfiring of synapses," Gus sputters. "Completely irrelevant images that appear as our brain catalogs information."

"Chill, dude," Shawn says, but Gus flinches as he waves his chopsticks. "I'm not going to kill you. It's just some freak dream about a really crusty yellow-eyed guy who tries to get me to kill people."

"Like cataracts yellow?"

"No," Shawn says, searching through his carton of rice for more of the chicken. "Like burning with the fire of a thousand suns yellow."

Gus slurps up another mouthful of noodles. "You know that's messed up, right?"

* * *

If you asked Shawn three weeks ago, he would have told you that being able to make people obey your every whim would be just about the coolest thing ever. In practice however, Shawn finds it lacking. He never realized it before, but half the fun in dragging Gus along on his crazy schemes is convincing Gus to go along on his crazy schemes. Shawn's a convincing guy. Truth be told, he doesn't need mind control to make people go along with his games, he just needs some creative lying.

Lying is an art form and Shawn in the supreme master. Words have always been his favorite weapon and weaving a tapestry of bluffs and lies, so ridiculous that people can't help but believe is his specialty.

So he goes to his father's house and starts to work on finding the off switch.

He's never been so glad to have his father call him an idiot in his life.

* * *

He thinks that's the end of it for a long time. He revels in watching Lassiter boil at ever mention of his ridiculous antics. He loves the look of the exasperation the chief gets when she lets him on a case where _they really do need him_. He concocts the wildest possible stories to get Gus out of the office and grins smugly every time it works. He even starts to enjoy every single way detective O'Hara turns downs his requests for dates.

And things go back to normal. Or at least as normal as they can get when Shawn's started dreaming of fire almost nightly.

* * *

Eventually, Shawn does what any normal person would do in the fact of hideously destructive nightmares: he stops sleeping.

Unfortunately this also leads to the consumption of copious amounts of caffeine and Gus puts his foot down before the third day is up.

"No," he says, taking away Shawn's caramel mocha latte. "No more."

"But Gus!" Shawn whines.

"No, I'm still dealing with the therapy bills from the last time you started drinking stuff with caffeine and I'm not going there again. Get some sleep."

"What happens if old yellow eyes shows up!" Shawn protests. "He may try to corrupt me again and I don't know if I have the willpower to resist!"

"Shawn, I'll take my chances with your brainwashing. You and caffeine is far more likely to get me killed."

* * *

So really, he blames Gus for the fact that when he finally falls asleep (after being awake for exactly two days, twenty three hours and thirteen minutes) he finds himself waking up in the middle of a ghost town. He wakes up on the porch of a dilapidated storefront. There is a broken window above him, but it hasn't shattered (the break originated from the inside. Shawn wants to think the original blow came from something about the size of a fist.)

He stumbles into this short little guy first with a baggy sweat shirt and red-tinged eyes. He keeps playing with the ends of his oversized shirt and Shawn absentmindedly notes every detail for later use.

It turns out there are six of them there that day, a girl named Lily who refused to touch anyone, the short guy with the fraying sweater, the sweet plump-face girl who freaks out and clutches at this huge guy with floppy hair and this solider in army fatigues. When they ask who he is, Shawn draws himself up and says, "My name is Shawn Spencer, I'm a psychic consultant for the Santa Barbara Police Department."

"Psychic," the tall one says and there's this note in his voice like he's figured something out (Shawn hates being outthought. He always has and always will). "Me too. Prophetic dreams mostly."

And it turns out that everyone in the group's a psychic. Actual legitimate psychics that have death visions or prophetic dreams and Shawn listens to the rest of them and thinks of those bizarre three weeks where everyone had to do what he said.

And thinks he might have gotten cheated because the anti-social girl has death hands, the soldier has super strength, the short guy's says something about planting images in people's head and the tall guy with the floppy hair admits to an episode of telekinesis.

When they look to Shawn he shrugs and says, "I've had the thing like Andy there." They all keep staring and he adds, "I've got a really good memory too but somehow I don't think that counts." He claps his hands together. "Dude, we've all got superpowers! We can form the ultimate crime fighting team! I totally call costume design!" He points to the big guy. "We may have to special order yours I'm not sure they make spandex that big."

* * *

Despite the fact that Shawn's definitely the oldest person out of their group of abductee (Shawn insists on calling them abductees because it sounds way cooler than kidnapped), it's the huge guy who takes the lead. Actually the huge guy has a name and the name is Sam Winchester (yes, Shawn quickly confirms, like the rifle. Also like the Winchester brothers who've showed up on wanted posters for months, but he doesn't ask about that). He happens to know the real deal and seriously Shawn wouldn't be buying the whole 'it's a demon' trip if it weren't for the creepy little girl ghost. "You know," Shawn says, shaking after the whole ordeal, "I can definitely use this all later because creepy little demon girls? Way way scarier than I've made them out to be."

Twenty minutes later they're all staring at Lily's body dangling from a windmill and Shawn can't see a way up, never saw a rope like that and he and everyone else know it's not a suicide. Sam starts spouting more about demonology and how the thing won't let them leave and Shawn finds himself watching Ava, watching the way she keeps sneaking looks toward the scene and how the tears don't quite flow naturally.

"Hey, lanky," he says, sidling up to Sam. "There's something up with that Ava chick."

"She's freaked," Sam says. "Just like the rest of us."

Shawn will be proven right hours later, but he isn't in the mood to gloat.

* * *

If he had actually slept more than a few hours in the past week, he might have made it through the night like he'd planned, but the second Shawn sat down, he fount himself out cold. Honestly he wouldn't have been able to tell he'd even fallen asleep, just that he blinked and all of a sudden he is out of the creepy ghost town and sitting at his desk in the offices at Psych. Opposite him is the man with the yellow eyes.

"Shawnie-boy," he greets. "Last and only remainder of his generation. You're the real ringer in the competition."

"I'm sorry," Shawn says. "I don't think we've been properly introduced, Mr. Demon. And come on man, everyone's calling you 'the Yellowed Eyed Man.' That's just lame. I think we can do better. How do you feel about the Amazing Mr. Fire Eyes? I would suggest Doctor Evil, but I think that's taken and honestly, you don't look much like the doctor type."

"Always the prankster, aren't we, Shawn," Yellow Eyes says. "An entire generation of gifted children and you're the only one left. All the others burned out, went mad, but not you."

"Newsflash, buddy," Shawn says. "If you listen to anyone who knows me, I went mad a long time ago, like it better here."

"You're a late bloomer sure, but you surprised me," continues Yellow Eyes. "You may be the one I need after all."

"Right," Shawn says slowly, "a demon's trying to pick me up in my own head. Just not happening, buddy."

"If you don't feel in a cooperative mood," Yellow Eyes says, "you're not going to make it out. It is a contest—extreme survivor."

"Dude, you still watch that show? Totally jumped the shark after the first season. I mean eating bugs, only really entertaining when it makes Gus puke."

"I need one of you. I need a leader. Last one breathing wins the prize."

"Your prize is kind of terrible. You see I have no desire to lead a demon army. Too many pitchforks and entrails. But on the other hand if you offered me a pineapple smoothie and a million dollars, we may be able to strike a deal."

The Demon stands up, nostrils flaring and Shawn swears the lights in the office dim with every breath he takes. "How's this for a prize. You play my game and your family gets to live. Your friend Guster continues on his pharmaceutical route, your dad gets to enjoy his retirement, that cute little blonde cop of yours gets to go about her live. Their fortunes will look good, when this is all over they'll be treated like royalty."

Listening to the speech, Shawn felt a smile snaking across his face. "Hey, I know what this is! You're totally trying to temp me into evil it's like—" Shawn snapped his fingers. "It's like that thing in the bible with the desert which totally makes you Satan." A smile slowly spread across Shawn's face. "Which means I'm totally Jesus! How dope is that?"

"I think you're missing the point," the demon growls.

"I think you need to get out of my head," Shawn says and then he wakes up to Sam Winchester's frantic voice.

"Ava's missing."

* * *

Sam and Jake make a break for it while Andy stays safe in their salt circle. Shawn has a prickle on the back of his neck as he trails after Sam, recalling the way Ava's eyes kept flickering to Lily's body hanging from the windmill, how she hadn't turned apart with disgust like Sam or kept staring out of some horrible fascination like Andy, he remembered the headache and when he makes it back to the safe hold, he's just in time to catch a glimpse of the demon cloud ripping Andy apart.

And Shawn does what any sane person would do in a situation like that. He turns and makes a break for it.

He doesn't know what he expected that night, maybe a never ending highway or a world that seemed to go in circles but he doesn't care. He just wants to get away.

He makes it to a road, stumbling down the shoulder for a good twenty extra minutes before a driver finally takes pity on him and pulls over. Shawn finds himself staring at the man for the entire ride, waiting to see a flicker of yellow in his kind brown eyes but it never came.

Three days later, he walks into Psych's offices, sits down heavily at his desk and goes through every detail in his mind, faces, people, the exact pattern Andy's blood made when it splattered onto the window. When Gus walks into the office later that day, he finds Shawn making a salt ring around the edge of the office.

Shawn never tells him why.

He doesn't have any more dreams.

* * *

Six months later, he's staring at the details of a case spread out all over his white board when there's a knock on his door. "Gus," he says, without glancing over to check, "about time you got here, you finished your route hours ago."

The figure in the door laughs and Shawn knows immediately that it's not Gus after all. He glances over to see Sam Winchesters standing awkwardly in the door way with a ghost of a smile on his face. "Psychic detective," he says lightly. "You weren't kidding."

"Sam Winchester," Shawn says.

"You made it out alive."

"I ran screaming like a little girl. I've come to terms with this and have moved on. You made it out too."

Sam shoves his hands in his pockets. "Not exactly in one piece, but yeah, still breathing."

"Should I be worried?" Shawn asks. "I mean has a yellow-eyed man offered you control of his demon army?"

Sam laughs. "No, not yet. He's dead actually. My brother put a bullet through his head. But you know stuff like this never really ends. There's a whole new world of problems to deal with."

"Oo! Are you and your brother on one of these demon hunting trips? Me and Gus could totally give you a hand!"

"No," Sam says. "Just passing through. Told my brother I was visiting a friend from Stanford. We're going to have to keep moving."

"FBI on your tail?" Shawn ventures. "You guys are totally like the brothers on Prison Break with the you know, prison breaking and the actually innocent part---you guys are innocent, right?"

"Yeah," Sam says. "You heard about that?"

"Psychic," Shawn replies automatically. "It's my job to know stuff like that."

"My visions have been gone since the demon bit it," Sam says.

"Psychic visions are my business," Shawn says.

Sam nods like he knows what he means and Shawn is grateful he doesn't need to explain. The charade has grown into something more than a game for him and it's something he just can't give up.

"Here," Sam says, scribbling a number on a scrap of paper and handing it to Shawn. "If anything weird happens, give me a call. We can help."

"Is this some sort of bizarre way of asking for my number?" Shawn says, glancing at the scrawl, committing the digits to memory, noting the curves of the numbers, the strokes of the pen. "Because I'm really not sure I'm comfortable with this."

"Way I figure it, we've got something in common."

"Look as happy as I am to be part of the mother a la flambé club, I'm not interested in the meetings. The secret decoder rings on the other hand I'll totally take off your hands."

There's a honk from outside and Shawn's eyes find the sources of the noise immediately, a Chevy Impala, '67, recently rebuilt, with a rusted license plate and a fresh dent on the driver's side door. "That's my brother," Sam says. "I've got to go. Take care of yourself, Shawn."

"Where's the fun in that?" Shawn replies.

Sam shakes his head and his floppy mass of hair swings wildly with it as he walks out the door and straight into Gus. He mutters, "Excuse me, I'm so sorry."

Gus stares after him and watches the impala until it leaves his line of sight. "Dude," he tells Shawn. "That was Sam Winchester!"

"Sam who?"

"Winchester! Sam Winchester! One of the infamous brothers Winchester. They're a serial killing team, really twisted stuff. They've been in police custody dozens of times but they always manage to slip out before they can be prosecuted. Haven't you ever watched America's Most Wanted?"

"First of all, Gus, what the hell are you doing watching America's Most wanted when it's on at the same time as Lost? Second, it's completely unfair to accuse someone of being a serial killer just because they're freakishly tall and physically imposing. Three—" He frowns. "There is no three. Four we've got more important things to worry about. I think I've made a break on our case."

He keeps talking, walking Gus through the specifics of a jewel heist and exactly which subjects were lying and he files Sam Winchester away in that distant corner of his mind where he's store his mother's death, the face of the yellow eyed demon, the blood pattern Andy's entrails made when Ava splattered them all over the wall and the key to his own ability. It will all be there waiting when he needs it.

You see that's the thing about Shawn; he doesn't forget.

(end)


End file.
